Cornelis de Houtman, was a Dutch explorer who discovered a new sea route from Europe to Indonesia and managed to begin the Dutch spice trade. At the time, the Portuguese Empire held a monopoly on the spice trade, and the voyage was a symbol...

Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator in the early 17th century. Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a prospective Northeast Passage to Cathay (today's China) via a route above the Arctic Circle....

Jacob van Heemskerk was a Dutch explorer and later admiral commanding the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Gibraltar. Van Heemskerk's early fame arose from an attempts to discover an Arctic passage from Europe to China. Two vessels sailed from...

Willem Cornelisz Schouten was a Dutch navigator for the Dutch East India Company. He was the first to sail the Cape Horn route to the Pacific Ocean.
In 1615 Willem Cornelisz Schouten and his younger brother Jan Schouten sailed from Texel...

Piet Pieterszoon Hein (Heyn) was a Dutch naval officer and folk hero during the Eighty Years' War between the Netherlands and Spain. Hein was born in Delfshaven (now part of Rotterdam), the son of a captain, and he became a sailor while he...

Dirk Hartog was a 17th-century Dutch sailor and explorer. Dirk Hartog's expedition was the second European group to land in Australia and the first to leave behind an artifact to record his visit,the Hartog plate. His name is sometimes alte...

Jacques Specx was a Dutch merchant, who founded the trade on Japan and Korea in 1609. Jacques Specx received the support of William Adams to obtain extensive trading rights from the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu on August 24, 1609, which allowed h...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen was an officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century, holding two terms as its Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies. He was long considered a national hero in the Netherlands, for provi...

The Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, "United East India Company") was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out co...

Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer and explorer best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644, in the service of the VOC (Dutch East India Company). His was the first European expedition to reach the islands of Van Diemen's Land (now T...

In 1606, the small Dutch ship Duyfken sailed from the Indonesian island of Banda in search of gold and trade opportunities on the fabled island of Nova Guinea. Under the command of Willem Janszoon, Duyfken and her crew ventured south-east....

The Thirteen Colonies were the British Colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America founded between 1607 (Virginia) and 1733 (Georgia). Individual colonies began collaborating at the Albany Congress of 1754 to demand more rights and set...

Jan van Riebeeck was a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator who arrived in Cape Town in the Dutch Cape Colony at the behest of the Dutch East India Company.
He also spent some time in Malaysia as part of his profession and served a...

Hendrick Hamel was the first Westerner to provide a first hand account of Joseon Korea. After spending thirteen years there, he wrote "Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666," which was subsequently published i...

Willem Hesselsz de Vlamingh was a Dutch sea-captain who explored the central west coast of Australia (then "New Holland") in the late 17th century. Vlamingh joined the VOC (Dutch East India Company) in 1688 and made his first voyage to Bata...